The study of comparative politics is currently invigorated by a world-wide perspective. There is now a lively concern with the politics of societies hitherto little regarded or left comfortably to specialists, and these societies often challenge familiar assumptions based on Western experience. Efforts to understand unfamiliar institutions or why formally similar political institutions perform differently in different societies inevitably forces attention outward from the political focus into wider reaches of each society.

This paper concerns an idea in which the writer became interested while trying to understand the political institutions of one people – the Baganda of East Africa.1 Fundamentally, however, it is a comparative idea which requires to be tested against a much wider range of data than one person commands. In such circumstances one attempts to achieve a measure of comparative perspective through “reading around” in the history of such other times and places as seem relevant, but amateur groping of this kind is no substitute for criticism by the uniquely wide range of specialists who constitute the clientele of this journal. It is therefore with more than the usual sincerity that the writer invites criticism.

The kingdom of Buganda, which extends over some seventeen thousand square miles of very fertile country to the north-west of Lake Victoria, was the original nucleus of the British Protectorate to which it has given its name. It was, indeed, the first firm base which the British possessed in the interior of East Africa, and it provided the model, and to a large extent the personnel, for the administration of the surrounding areas. Buganda was also the first part of as East Africa in which Christian teaching took root, and the centre from which Christian beliefs were diffused among a wide range of heathen tribes. The Baganda were the first people in the region to become literate, and the first to take part, with any degree of willingness and success, in the cultivation of exportable crops.

Over a century ago, Tocqueville named slavery as the source of the American prejudice against the Negro. Contrary to the situation in antiquity, he remarked: “Among the moderns the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color.” Furthermore, he wrote, though “slavery recedes” in some portions of the United States, “the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable”. More modern observers of the American past have also stressed this causal connection between the institution of slavery and the color prejudice of Americans. Moreover, it is patent to anyone conversant with the nature of American slavery, particularly as it functioned in the nineteenth century, that the impress of bondage upon the character and future of the Negro in the United States has been both deep and enduring.

Reflecting upon the career in the colonial government of Formosa that was to win him world-wide fame in the early twentieth century, Baron Shimpei Goto once remarked that “Japan had made no preparations whatever for the administration of the island at the time of its acquisition”. Underscoring this neglect, he added, was “the fact that, in the case of other nations confronted by a similar occasion, elaborate schemes are generally formulated to meet contingencies connected with the occupation of a new territory”. One may wonder whether the Baron included among the “elaborate schemers” the “absent-minded” builders of the British Empire.

It does not matter whether Baron Goto was aware of the complex historical processes, of the actions and accidents, involved in the creation of great empires. It is not even important whether he really believed that the colonial programs of the imperial powers were, like the war plans carefully devised by army general staffs, drawn from secret files as occasions demanded. Goto was primarily interested in the formulation and implementation of a colonial policy for Japan. His observation on his government's lack of preparedness to assume control and direction of Formosan affairs should thus be taken not simply as a confession and condemnation but rather as a statement of purpose.

The impact of Henry George's land value taxation theory was nothing less than global in scope, and his epochal Progress and Poverty – first published in 1879 – gained wider fame than any other political or socio-economic treatise emanating from an American pen. While George's doctrine was essentially a product of of his experience in California during the land-grabbing 60's and 70's, the most pervasive influence of the San Francisco sage was not manifested at home, but in Europe, Australasia and other distant places.

It is with some aspects of this remarkable diffusion of Georgeism during the latter part of the 19th century that this study is concerned. In particular, we would like to examine the circumstances under which this ideological stimulus was transmitted and received in such divergent settings as England, China and Japan. First we will trace the history of the Georgeist influence in each of these countries and then compare their respective patterns of development.

It is a distinguishing feature of modern Western historical thought that it has striven self-consciously to free itself from the use of non-historical categories of explanation in order to consitute itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory and self-justifying form of thought. Croce believed this movement to be a late phase of humanism and identified it as the main ingredient in the Western intellectual tradition. In his view, the history of historiography in the West has been one long struggle to expel the category of transcendence from historical analysis, that is, a struggle of history against philosophy of history.

Unlike modern historical thought with its value free orientation, most previous historiography has been informed, either consciously or unconsciously, by a specific set of social values and has used historical materials as either a mine of examples for support of the position pre-chosen (like Cicero) or as evidence for the study of phenomena the noumena of which lie just outside the range of history proper (like Marx). The former approach never really arrives at history, the latter passes through it too rapidly to the goal which it believes lies beyond it. In so far as most previous historiography has been governed by these two tendencies, it has always been philosophy of history rather than history proper.

Historic China and pre-industrial Europe were both once typed as rigid societies with their population more or less frozen into fixed social groupings. Since in both cases the trend of research has altered this view, one cannot help wondering why it ever prevailed. The present revision in Chinese studies is the more dramatic in being a return to the view of Quesnay, namely, that Confucian ideals guaranteed a constant social circulation: men of merit could rise in the world, but their sons, if they were inept, would sink. In medieval and early modern European studies there has been a steady shift away from emphasis on hereditary fixity to recognition that very considerable currents of social mobility may exist within a stable social structure.

In both fields writers had begun by relying on ideals of order, rather incautiously, as a clue to actual custom. Confucian philosophy and ethical doctrine, it is true, gave rise to Quesnay's happy guess, but when this was discarded as doubtful, scholars fell back on legal texts. Here they found ideals of order expressed in an array of distinctions of juridical status. Instead of still postulating that these were mere lines of demarcation between groups, lines that a man could cross, they chose to regard them as effective barriers to mobility.